Against Optionality.
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Highlights
- The tech ideal of being a bi-coastal, sexually-unmoored IC with a paid newsletter and a scout fund is fundamentally about optionality and flexibility. Total freedom with fallback options and alternatives aplenty. That desire for optionality and flexibility is a reflection of the belief that there might, at some point in the near future, be something/someone better to do/be.
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Counterintuitively, being optionality-obsessed is just as fearful as it is optimistic. It reflects the fear of making the wrong choice just as much as hope for making the right one.
- Optionality lets you preserve the chance that youâll strike gold and minimize the risk of committing to the wrong thing but only by avoiding commitment at all.
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Options arenât free. They come with hard and soft costs. So if you want to keep all options open, you have to be prepared to pay for it.
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If you never risk commitment to the wrong thing, you might not have enough experience to confidently commit to the right thing when it comes along. Finally, if youâre always focused on the next thing, it seems hard or impossible to simultaneously focus on the task or opportunity at hand.
- Iâm a believer that we ought to âdisagree and commitâ when making decisions as a group. We can apply a similar idea in our own lives. Accept that something might be wrong but, based on the belief that the worst choice is no choice, do it anyway and do it with gusto until youâre demonstrably right or wrong, or have gotten from it all you can. Then move on and do it again.
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Commitment need not be for life or even particularly long term, but the refusal to commit to something at all can defeat the purpose of doing it in the first place. Itâs a Faustian bargain: trading away impact for optionality.